Corporate Credibility depends on keeping your “ethics guard” a top priority.

A key focus of ongoing education, especially in compliance/ethics, is to learn from the past, glean the key points learned and used them to forge ahead in a more thoughtful ,targeted and proactive approach.

This is particularly relevant today with whistleblower issues, large corporate settlements for wrongdoing, not knowing who’s telling truth and who isn’t, and who to trust.

We can never let our guard down when comes to ethics. Being vigilant, attentive and discerning needs to be the focus. Being proactive is high road behavior, builds loyalty, fosters positive morale, and can have a significant impact on decreasing the odds of a costly lawsuit.

Ongoing ethics training is to be non-negotiable, consistently provide techniques, insights, and creative, proactive approaches to help all handle any future “questionable” situations. Formats, ways to deliver this training and processes to do follow up, are crucial to keeping this point from becoming a “one shot” ethics training effort. This keeps all involved, proactive and engaged in seeing the value, relevance, and importance of keeping our guard up, as well, as for how to deal with certain issues when they arise.

Transparency then becomes the lynchpin to developing a trust dimension, not only among ourselves, but with our customers, and communities. Therefore, one needs to examine how transparent is the decision making processes, policies, and procedures? How clear are the organization’s governance structures? For all of these issues create credibility, loyalty and a great “checks and balances” environment for employees, vendors, suppliers, customers, etc.

Equally important in all of this is, if one expects this type of commitment, approach to ethics,recognizes and rewards those who have “embraced” this and have shown through their attitude and behavior, then the value of being ethical becomes recognizable for all employees. This is not good only for the individual, but for the company and community as a whole.

Therefore, being proactive is a choice for your time, resources, and financial investment that you need to be willing to do. Are you?